Few modern Greek villages can point to such unbroken nominal continuity. The name Daulis appears in Homer's Iliad; it appears on Ottoman census records in 1466 (written as Tavla) when the settlement had 150 families, and again in 1506 with 220 families. Frankish documents from the last years of Latin rule in central Greece use the form Daulia. Through Byzantine administration, Ottoman occupation, and Greek independence, the name persisted in recognizable form. When travelers and antiquarians began visiting in the 19th century, they found the modern village directly below the ancient site, a continuity of settlement that is relatively rare and archaeologically useful: the medieval church of Agios Theodoros stands inside the ancient acropolis enclosure, a physical layering of sacred use across two millennia.

Davleia was not a passive bystander in modern Greek history. The revolutionary fighter Panagiotis Antonopoulos was born here, and the village's inhabitants took an active part in the uprising of 1821. The area became a recurring battlefield between Greek revolutionaries and Ottoman troops. In 1856, gunmen from Davleia participated in the operation that ended the career of the outlaw Davelis — a robber whose name would later attach, with a certain dark romance, to a cave near Athens. The upheavals of the twentieth century left their mark as well. On 5 May 1943, a detachment of Italian Occupation forces set the settlement on fire. On January 29, 1918, during the political crisis of the National Schism, a clash between gendarmerie and anti-Venizelist forces left five Cretan gendarmes and an officer dead; six people, two soldiers and four civilians, were subsequently executed by military court order.

Mythology gave Davleia two landmark associations, both preserved in local tradition. The acropolis above the village is the site of ancient Daulis, mythological home of Tereus — the king whose crimes drove Procne and Philomela to the transformations that became the nightingale and the swallow. Those stories belong to the ancient city; Davleia inherited the geography. The village's second mythological neighbor is more unexpected: near Davleia, tradition locates the crossroads where Oedipus, traveling to Delphi to learn his fate, killed an old man who refused to yield the road. He did not know the man was his father, Laius, king of Thebes. The road from Daulis to Delphi passed through here, and the detail that Oedipus took one fork and not the other — passed through this valley rather than another — is embedded in the myth's geography. The modern village thus stands in a landscape dense with Greek tragedy, carrying those stories lightly, as villages do.

Beyond mythology and history, Davleia is simply a place where people live, organized around its valley in the foothills of Parnassus. Since the Kallikratis administrative reform of 2011, it forms a municipal unit of Livadeia, a larger town to the east. The municipal unit covers nearly 95 square kilometers, including the eastern flanks of Mount Parnassos. National Road 3 passes near the village, connecting it to Livadia, Lamia, and central Greece. The railway station to the north serves Athens and Leianokladi. The fortifications of the ancient acropolis are preserved in good condition on the hillside above, and the nunnery north of town draws its own quiet visitors. Population figures tell the story of rural Greece in the late twentieth century: 2,264 in 1981, 1,240 by 2011. The village endures, as it has through far more dramatic losses.